1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to generating information from packed representations of meaning.
2. Description of Related Art
Conventional natural language generation systems operate on a single meaning representation to generate alternate phrases that have meaning. Conventional translation systems parse a phrase in the source language into a set of meanings, choose a meaning from the set, transfer the meaning into a set of meanings appropriate for the target language, choose a meaning from this set, and then generate from this meaning. However, conventional translation systems sometimes choose the wrong meaning. This can be a problem when the source language contains an ambiguity that the target language does not contain. For instance, the Japanese word “bei” can mean either “rice” or “the United States”. If a conventional translation system makes the wrong choice, the reader can become hopelessly confused.
An alternative is to translate all the meanings. Techniques are available for obtaining a packed representation of the meaning of the source sentence and transferring the packed representation into a packed meaning representation appropriate for the target language. The resulting packed meaning representation must be unpacked in order to generate. Martin Kay describes a conventional method for generating alternate phrases from a chart in “Chart Generation” in Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics”, pp. 200-204, Santa Cruz, Calif., herein incorporated by reference in its entirety. However, these conventional generation techniques are expensive since a natural language sentence can have an exponential number of meanings.